By Kennedy Maize
“Since its 2009 formation under Obama, ARPA-E within the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded about $4.2 billion to some 1,700 energy projects. The latest nuclear revival continues a long string of starts-and-stops for a technology that has been more promise than performance.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright and the White House appear to be headed for a clash on major DOE spending programs, including the agency’s Loan Programs Office and the main research arm, Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-Energy).
Last week, DOE earmarked another $57.8 million in federal money to the Palisades nuclear plant resurrection in Michigan, part of a $1.52 DOE billion loan to Holtec International for the project.
Since DOE’s Loan Programs Office approved the deal last September, the agency has doled out almost $96 million for the restart of the 805-MW reactor that shut down in 2022, starting with $38 million this January.
The Biden administration and two Democratic Michigan governors, Gretchen Whitmer and her predecessor, Jennifer Granholm, who was also Biden’s energy secretary, were important parts of the impetus behind the Palisades subsidy. Despite this prehistory, Wright said: “Today’s action is yet another step toward advancing President Trump’s commitment to increase domestic energy production, bolster our security and lower costs for the American people.”
As keynote speaker at ARPA-E’s annual “summit” meeting at a Maryland resort, Wright touted the technology (modeled on the DOD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) as essential in the AI race in terms of U.S. national defense and medical science.
The only way we can get there is if we grow our energy system faster and faster, and that’s why you are all here. There is a huge, life-changing opportunity for innovation there.
Since its 2009 formation under Obama, ARPA-E has awarded about $4.2 billion to some 1,700 energy projects. The latest nuclear revival continues a long string of starts-and-stops for a technology that has been more promise than performance., from “too cheap to meter” in 1954 to George W. Bush’s Energy Policy Act of 2005 allocating $2 billion for up to six new reactor projects.
Fiscal Prudency?
On January 28, the White House’s Office of Management and budget produced a 52-page spreadsheet (obtained by Bloomberg) listing targets for a spending axe or Elon Musk’s chain saw. Among the myriad targets: DOE’s Loan Program Office and ARPA-E. The next day, a federal judge issued a temporary hold on those program cuts, which expired in February. No cuts have been made to date.
The DOE press release on the Palisades funds characterized the financing as a “loan guarantee,” a term the federal government and Congress stole in 2005 to imply that Uncle Sam was simply backstopping private sector money. The aim was to free up money for the construction of new nuclear plants after the first generation had fizzled out. But the solons didn’t want it to look like they were risking taxpayer dollars, which they were.
That didn’t work – as the outrageously expensive new Vogtle units in Georgia and the failed V.C. Summer project in South Carolina demonstrated.
A conventional loan guarantee, as defined by Investopedia, is “a type of loan in which a third party agrees to pay if the borrower should default.” DOE’s “loan guarantees” are loans, much like car loans. The borrower provides a down payment of 20% and DOE picks up the rest. The loans are approved by the Treasury Department and disbursed by Treasury’s Federal Financing Bank, which also collects loan payments.
According to the Code of Federal Regulations, “The full faith and credit of the United States is pledged to the payment of principal and interest.” If a borrower defaults on principal or interest payments, and “such default has not been cured within the applicable grace period, the (Treasury) Secretary shall notify the Attorney General.”
Political Controversy
The DOE loan authorities have come under fire since the 2011 collapse of the advanced solar photovoltaic firm Solyndra, leaving the Obama administration holding a bag containing a $527 million default.
A 2012 monograph from the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center – Pure Risk: Federal Clean Energy Loan Guarantees – offered a series of critiques of the loan guarantees, especially for nuclear plants. NPEC Executive Director Henry Sokolski wrote in a foreword:
This volume spotlights the costs and risks associated with federal clean energy loan guarantees….They point to the half billion dollars Solyndra has already cost U.S. taxpayers.
In 2017, Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas) and four other hard-right House conservatives – Mark Meadows of North Carolina, Pete Sessions of Texas, Gary Palmer of Alabama, and Jim Jordan of Ohio – introduced legislation to “amend the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to repeal certain loan guarantee programs of the Department of Energy, and for other purposes.” It went nowhere.
The Heritage Foundation’s 2023 book Mandate for Leadership Project 2025 – which Trump disdained during the campaign and has frequently attempted to implement once in office – says the “DOE Loan Program should be eliminated or reformed,” along with a list of other DOE subsidy programs including the “DOE Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED); Office of State and Community Energy Programs; ARPA-E; Office of Grid Deployment (OGD).”
Euthanizing of those DOE programs would require congressional action, which is unlikely.
False Promises Perennial Hopes
Vaclav Smil [Energy Myths and Realities (AEI Press, 2010)] has described nuclear fission as a “successful failure.” On the positive side: ““Nuclear fission is a reliable, high-capacity, high load mode of electricity generation, which makes it an ideal complement to various renewable conservation modes that still have mostly low-capacity, moderate-load, and unpredictably intermittent operations.” But instead of meeting expectations, he adds, “nuclear power has fulfilled only a fraction of its original promise.” [1]
Trump 47’s DOE needs to think through nuclear policy from the ground up.
[1] Vaclav Smil, Energy Myths and Realities (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 2010), pp, 42, 40, 32.
———————-
This is a slightly revised version of what was originally posted at The Quad Report, the blog site of electricity expert Kennedy Maize. Other posts by Maize at MasterResource are here.
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“Nuclear Subsidies: Did DOE’s Wright Get the Message?”
So what is the message? Do we like them or not?
“Last week, DOE earmarked another $57.8 billion in federal money to the Palisades nuclear plant”
Billion?
Wrong, as usual, by three orders of magnitude.
https://www.energy.gov/lpo/holtec-palisades
https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-approves-loan-disbursement-palisades-nuclear-plant
https://wwmt.com/news/local/energy-department-loan-dispursement-million-billion-restart-palisades-nuclear-power-plant
Just querying
Probably Australian dollars, Nick 😛
Solyndra and other Obama benfactors donated many millions back to the DNC. Their barkruptcy happened very abruptly and not long after some of these funds came to them, and, as far as I know, a proper accounting was never done. There was no DOGE then, or if there was Biden ran it to hide it.
So, 57.8 is part of 1.52? What mathematical system is being used here?
New math.
1 + 1 = 2 … How do you feel about that?
“Last week, DOE earmarked another $57.8 billion in federal money to the Palisades nuclear plant”
nick, it is sad that this amount of money needs to be committed to solve a problem that should never have been created.
but that is not the real story here.
the real story is in the answer to the following question.
why is the palisades nuclear power plant being re-commissioned?
Extending on your thought:
Which is more economical and time efficient? Recommissioning Palisades or starting a new build?
i would say re-commissioning.
That really depends on the extent of repair and refurbishment.
I do not have any data so I am merely exploring alternatives.
What if there is major structural overhaul needed, as an example?
Yes, million…. My mistake….
We like nuclear, we don’t like subsidies.
Like most on the left, Nick assumes that the natural response to things we like, is to have government subsidize it.
This article highlights a mathematical puzzle.
For many years, we have lived with inflation of the cost of living, such as the change in price of a basket of goods, year by year. We have seen rates of inflation in “stable” economies rise by (say) 5% per annum, which leads to doubling of price over about 14 years.
The average wage in the US has increased by about 3.2% per annum since 1985.
In 1985, the community was in awe of a person rich enough to be named a
“millionaire”. In the 40 years since then we have seen the appearance of the “billionaire” and now the “trillionaire”. These names show a growth many, many times faster than cost of living. The difference between millionaire and trillionaire is 1,000,00 times, rather distant from a doubling every 14 years.
The millionaire to trillionaire growth has been so rapid that people are so confused about magnitude that they mix up terms. But, the more interesting mathematical problem is why one expression of the growth of a money indicator is in a stodgy 3-4% per annum while another is in a rampant 250,000% per annum or so.
What happened to the middle terms in the millionaire race? Where was the term for a millionaire who had made it to $10,000,000, like “ten-millionaire” then the term for $100,000,000, like “hundred-millionaire” before “billionaire”?
I suspect that many of us have lost the connection between the growth of the real value of money and some publicity terms for money that have increased at a rate that most people never see or feel.
Geoff S
Yes. Back in the 60s, Senator Dirksen said “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you are talking about real money”
Not for Musk and co
Actually, he used million, not billion. The US budget for 1960 was only about $81 billion.
See what I mean about confusion with numbers?
Geoff S
Money has been sucked out of the pockets of ordinary people into the pockets of the already wealthy. The numbers cited indicate the scale on which it has happened.
And when that happens by government fiat, it is generally wasteful and completely unnecessary, as in all things containing the word “climate.”
Wind farms and solar farms are subsidy farms transferring wealth to the politically connected wealthy.
Has it really? Or has new wealth been created?
Ordinary people did not collectively have trillions of dollars in their pockets. The economy grows (and contracts). Ordinary people aren’t poor because someone else got rich. Musk, Gates, Buffett, et al, never took a dime from me.
Well, at first they didn’t. Many of the billionaire class do seem to want to pull the ladder up behind themselves once they made it to the top. After becoming wealthy by inventing new products, creating better ways of doing things through free markets, they want to use government coercion, taxes, subsidies, mandates, etc, to create their next fortune.
Musk and Gates are in fact excellent examples of how to become rich through monopolies and government subsidies. Microsoft aggressively went after any competition in the OS space and then deliberately bundled internet explorer with windows killing the competition. Once it had signed the agreement to put MS-DOS on computers the free market in operating systems was essentially over and it had complete control.
Musk got rich through government contracts for SpaceX and subsidies for electric cars. Now he is helping run the US government you find the president trying to sell cars for him and you can bet that Space X is going to get a lot more government contracts in the near future.
The Space X launch system and capsule work.
So it is Space X this time around, not Boeing.
Build a better mousetrap and buyers will beat a path to your door.
Now, the thoughtful question is: Had Musk not created all those companies, how many people would today be unemployed? How much additional debt would the Tax Payers have to accept due to lower tax revenues.
I think you’ve confused monopoly and monopsony. Furthermore, Musk didn’t create a monopoly in space launches either. Just reusable, cost effective space launches. Anyone who wants to crash into the sea at the end of the launch pays a similar price to Musk as they do to the Russians or Chinese.
“Money has been sucked out of the pockets of ordinary people “
Someone can correct me but much of the money of which you speak is created anew. An exception is the flow of money from “ordinary” mothers and daughters to Taylor Swift.
[M. Soylent makes the same claim.]
The Australian newspaper last week published a list of the richest 250 Australians. How did they get rich?
One story covered the Penrite oil products, a family enterprise. This was a clear example of development of a tangible product that was in demand by many consumers.
Another story concerned a software developer who made billions from the international sale of an intangible product that made harvesting gambling money more efficient.
There is a.difference. One clearly has potential to benefit the public while the other could have potential to harm the public.
I am not at all against people making a lot of money, but I prefer to see a social benefit, especially the generation of new national wealth as opposed to the shuffling of existing wealth and taking a cut on the side.
By a rough count, I felt that 90% or so of the 250 richest got there the second way, being clever or lucky with their manipulation of existing wealth.
With some exceptions, some of these wealthy seem to assume that their wealth carries a licence to try to change public policy, for example in funding political candidates to promote (rapidly failing now) concepts like “net zero carbon by 2050”, whatever that means.
There is no such rich licence to rule.
Geoff S
Centimillionaire.
Even I could claim to be one of those. I think you mean hectomillionaire.
Just because the metric system uses the “centi-” prefix that way doesn’t mean that’s the only correct usage. A century is 100 years. A centipede has 100 legs (maybe not literally, but certainly no one would argue that the name suggested a creature with 0.1 leg). A centurion is one of a hundred men, so even the Romans weren’t consistent about it. Fun fact, the length of a mile was established as 1,000 paces of an average Roman centurion.
You conflate centurion with legionnaire. You are forgiven.
100 soldiers was a centuria with a centurio being the equivalent of a sergeant, lieutenant, and sometimes captain.
It was not that the Romans were inconsistent with the centuria roster, it was more often due to casualties and recruitment issues.
Brings back my days, long ago, of fascination with the Roman Legions and history of Rome.
Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est.
“the length of a mile was established as 1,000 paces of an average Roman centurion”
Sounds suitably metric. And a centimetre is 100 paces of an average centipede 🙂
Shoddy work. Did the slightly revised version improve an even worse version or introduce new errors?
What’s a “$1.52 DOE billion loan”?
$57.8 billion is a part of $1.52 billion?
As the Barbie doll said, “Math is hard”
Sure nuclear power has been crippled by bureaucracy for the past 50 years, and nothing that government does is untainted by massive waste, fraud, and abuse. Probably (nay, certainly) anything supported by both wicked witches of the North (Whitmer and Granholm) would have to be corrupt and counterproductive so I don’t doubt that changes should be made. But let’s not throw the nuclear baby out with the bath water.
Author’s school used the Common Core mathematics.
From the article: “In 2017, Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas) and four other hard-right House conservatives”
Only a hard-left writer/thinker would describe them that way.
Everything that is not leftist is dismissed or denigrated as being “far right,” “hard right” etc. to attempt to paint anything not leftist approved as a “fringe” or “dangerous” point of view.
According to those on the left, the political spectrum goes
Communist->Socialist->far right
Exactly!
… or MAGA
… or radical MAGA
Concerning the Palisades nuclear plant, why not continue to use a valuable asset that has provided reliable electricity for decades? Although this plant is a one-of-a-kind design, which makes operation and maintenance a little more expensive (like owning a car whose model was produced in low numbers, it’s more expensive to get parts), the plant itself is in good shape. The only issue is the steam generators, which need some tubes repaired with “sleeving,” a technique that has been around for a long time.
https://www.neimagazine.com/advanced-reactorsfusion/sg-repair-has-something-up-its-sleeve/
The two ex-governors of Michigan mentioned the article have caused Michigan’s electricity producing capability to diminish. With RES requirements and emission reduction targets coal plants are/wil be shutting down. The resurrection of a nuclear plant is needed so they don’t look like the dolts they are.
They want LINE 5 shut down, all coal fire plants shut down, the nuclear plants are shut, and only want wind and solar allowed along with Chinese battery plants.
If they get the EV mandate they want the UP will be filled with ghost towns.
Everyplace run by idiots pushing those policies should be isolated from the national electric grid so they can show us all just how great it works.
And so the voters in such states will run them out on a rail come the next election in favor of someone capable of critical thinking.
Allowing them to import power produced using coal and gas (and nuclear) generated beyond their state borders just props up their stupid agendas and allows greater damage to be done before people realize it.
Say what? Where, what when and how has Trump attempted to implement P2025? Details, please.
There has always been some overlap between the policies of Trump and those of Heritage Foundation.
The left tries to use this overlap as proof that they agree on everything, and that Heritage actually controls Trump.
Funny, I thought Musk controls Trump.
I don’t remember Trump ever “disdaining” Project 2025, though he often said that it wasn’t produced by his team (it wasn’t) and that he was not bound by it.
Trump is implementing the policies he campaigned on. If it so happens that those same policies were listed in P2025, that’s just a coincidence.
Both Heritage Foundation and Trump are conservatives, so naturally, they will agree on a lot of issues.
“Both Heritage Foundation and Trump are conservatives, so naturally, they will agree on a lot of issues.”
There you go!
The Left likes to indulge in Bizarro-World conspiracy theories.
The Left is divorced from reality. They certainly don’t live in the world the rest of us live in. They live in a very Delusional World where cutting unnecessary spending is a bad thing, and Trump is a Dictator, manipulated by the Oligarch, Elon Musk, and together they are going to take over the United States.
Delusional.. Out of touch with reality. And there are millions of them!
We buy nuclear power for purposes of acquiring high energy reliability and security benefits, for which we are obliged to pay a premium over what gas-fired power generation costs.
It is a public policy decision to decide how large that cost premium should be, and to decide where that point comes wherein nuclear’s costs exceed nuclear’s reliability and security benefits.
New-build nuclear will not go forward in the United States without direct government support in various forms including loan guarantees and also direct subsidization.
The Trump administration should state the reality of the situation in these simple terms and demand that the nuclear industry be completely transparent and honest in its cost estimation figures for new-build nuclear projects.
With those honest cost figures available to them, public policy decision makers can then make a rational decision concerning whether or not the additional cost of a nuclear project over an equivalent gas-fired project is worth the energy security and reliability benefits nuclear delivers.
I admit I spent 30y in the nuclear power industry, so I must be a little ‘warped’; however, nuclear has a couple of things going for it that are hard to factor in — it can provide a lot of energy for many, many years and it’s not the basis for thousands of other products. Coal, natural gas and oil provide feedstock that our current civilization depends upon. We shouldn’t ‘waste’ them on producing electricity while the nuclear option exists.
The first step is to eliminate unneeded regulations.
Until that happens, the costs will remain prohibitive.
This post is less than helpful. I think I can help this fella out.
Nuclear power is the way forward. It has fought an uphill battle from the beginning primarily because of politics. Bad politics, not just from politicians but also so called NGOs. There is a reason the industry has experienced a stop and go history. There is a massive movement standing in its way causing delays and raising costs at every step with a lot of help from many inside the government including regulators. The nuclear industry can share some of the blame but they have always fought an uphill battle. Nuclear works that is not in dispute. Fossil fuel and hydro work that is not in dispute. Wind and solar don’t that is not in dispute. Let’s concentrate on what works.
Maize’s other concern seems to be federal financing, I don’t blame him there the government is a mess and can’t be trusted. So here is the thing if federal dollars (my dollars) are going to be used to promote energy systems let’s spend those dollars on things that work not piss them away on things that don’t. You can call the support anything you want I don’t care what you call it. Fossil fuel and nuclear are the clear winners here. For purposes of generating electricity we should go all in on nuclear but not neglect fossil fuel
I don’t give a damn what Maize thinks about the people encouraging safe, clean, affordable, long lived, reliable and dispatchable fossil fuel and nuclear energy.
The only reason that nuclear power has not contributed far more is regulation. The USA cost to build a large reactor could be cut by 75-90% based on historical numbers. South Korea was building them at a far lower cost just a few years ago. The NRC must be made to drop the absurd “linear no-threshold” approach and be stopped from tightening regulations every time another safety improvement is made.
This article wrongly makes it sound like there is something intrinsically problematic about nuclear. Nuclear is a fantastic energy source and can be easily competitive with fossil fuels (and even at current cost is better than unreliables) but regulation must be reformed.
With lower costs, government subsidies would not be an issue.
Sparta Nova 4: “The first step is to eliminate unneeded regulations. Until that happens, the costs will remain prohibitive.”
Max More: “The only reason that nuclear power has not contributed far more is regulation. The USA cost to build a large reactor could be cut by 75-90% based on historical numbers. …..”
Not …. The primary cost driver for nuclear power in the year 2025 is the lack of a robust nuclear industrial base in most western nations, combined with a general decline in the larger industrial base in all of those nations.
Nuclear regulation covers the areas of basic nuclear safety, ALARA requirements for operational worker radiation exposure, design and operational requirements affected by LNT exposure theory, and last but not least, system & component quality assurance requirements.
The next five to ten years will see a reduction in the NRC’s basic nuclear safety requirements, in the ALARA requirements, and also a move away from LNT radiation exposure theory. What we will not see — and what we should not see — is a reduction in the nuclear system & component quality assurance requirements.
Nuclear power is Industrial with a capital ‘I”. It requires that a thoroughly professional job be done in every facet of nuclear design, construction, and follow-on operations. New-build nuclear power requires an industrial base which can actually do a thoroughly professional end-to-end job in managing and performing every facet of nuclear design, construction, and follow-on operations.
Nuclear is different in that there is very little room for error in all facets of the project delivery process, end-to-end. An error in one step of the end-to-end delivery process has cascading consequences for subsequent steps in ways which are more impactful than those occuring in other non-nuclear industrial construction projects.
What we saw 40+ years ago in the nuclear construction industry, and what we have seen repeated at VC Summer and at Vogtle 3 & 4 more recently, was that some power utilities were much better at managing their nuclear projects than other power utilities.
In the 1970’s and early 1980’s, the NRC had given licenses to power utilities which were not capable of doing the things they said they were capable of doing.
The written license application documents, the basis for granting an NRC license were OK. The NRC would not have approved those documents had they not been OK. What went wrong was that many of the power utilities, the ones which were experiencing severe cost and schedule overruns, had failed to implement the plans and the programs described in those license documents.
Most importantly, there was a failure to implement the NRC-required quality assurance controls for safety affecting systems and components, with the consequence that expensive nuclear-grade systems and components were basically being bought twice.
Whistleblowers on the job whose valid concerns were being ignored by their project managers went outside the projects to the anti-nuclear activists. The activists then switched their focus from issues of basic nuclear safety to issues concerning a lack of nuclear-grade quality assurance on poorly-managed nuclear construction projects, doing so with considerable success.
Those nuclear projects which were eventually terminated were already in deep trouble well before the NRC stepped in to shut them down. And so the NRC found itself in the position of arriving on the battlefield late and shooting the wounded.
Max More, the real costs of all categories of industrial construction in the United States are roughly three times what they were in the late 1980’s. A variety of factors are at play here, with the most important being the general decline of the larger industrial base in most western nations.
Scaling back on NRC requirements for basic nuclear safety, for ALARA radiation exposure, and for LNT-driven design requirements will have some positive effect on costs. We may see an overall cost savings of 10 to 15 percent from those reforms.
However, the NRC’s requirements for system & component quality assurance cannot and will not be abandoned. Abandoning those nuclear-grade QA requirements would put a final end to any prospects for a nuclear construction revival in the United States.
As someone who was involved in doing detailed cost estimates in the late 2000’s for nuclear construction in the US, I will say that a claim that the USA cost to build a large reactor could be cut by 75-90% based on historical numbers is completely absurd.
“NRC’s requirements for system & component quality assurance cannot and will not be abandoned”
Why not? When was the NRC ever held to account that their standards were appropriate?
BrokenGlassHearts: “NRC’s requirements for system & component quality assurance cannot and will not be abandoned” Why not? When was the NRC ever held to account that their standards were appropriate?”
It is one thing to challenge the NRC’s requirements for basic nuclear safety, for ALARA radiation exposure, and for design requirements demanded in response to LNT radiation theory. Much argument can be made that the NRC’s requirements in those areas are excessive and can be streamlined, reduced, and/or eliminated with no impact on public safety.
It is quite another thing to challenge the NRC’s QA requirements which in their aggregate ensure that a nuclear plant’s safety-affecting systems and components are fabricated, constructed, installed, and tested to a level of discipline which gives the public confidence that a nuclear plant was constructed in accordance with its approved design specs and is therefore presumed safe to operate.
The definition of Nuclear QA, according to USNRC 10 CFR 50 Appendix B, KEPIC QAP, is this:
‘As used in this appendix, “quality assurance” comprises all those planned and systematic actions necessary to provide adequate confidence that a structure, system, or component will perform satisfactorily in service. Quality assurance includes quality control, which comprises those quality assurance actions related to the physical characteristics of a material, structure, component, or system which provide a means to control the quality of the material, structure, component, or system to predetermined requirements.’
10 CFR 50 Appendix B, which has been around since the early 1970’s, contains a list of high level QA program requirements known to nuclear QA specialists as “the Eighteen Criteria”. Nothing is missing from that list which would have prevented the serious QA program failures which occured in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s in the nuclear industry, failures which resulted in the termination of several large new-build projects..
What we were seeing forty years ago — and what we saw again with the VC Summer project, the Vogtle 3 & 4 project, and with the Department of Energy’s MOX project — is that serious deficiencies in a project’s QA program were, more often than not, a direct reflection of other serious deficiencies in the plant’s overall project management effort as a whole.
The long and the short of it is this: The kind of project management discipline needed to implement effective nuclear QA is the same kind of project management discipline needed to effectively manage every other element of a nuclear project. The absence of effective nuclear QA is a warning sign that a nuclear construction project as a whole is in serious trouble.
“It is quite another thing to challenge the NRC’s QA requirements which in their aggregate ensure that a nuclear plant’s safety-affecting systems and components are fabricated, constructed, installed, and tested to a level of discipline which gives the public confidence that a nuclear plant was constructed in accordance with its approved design specs and is therefore presumed safe to operate.”
If the point is to give the public confidence, then there definitely is room to maneuver, as I doubt the public can assess safety much beyond accidents of public record. If the idea is to construct a system that may be “presumed safe”, well I’m not sure that’s an appropriate standard at all.
It’s all well and good if parts are constructed to a measured and tested standard in accordance with QA, but are we assuming we have the correct standard, or did we learn the correct standard? Is it really so hard to build to what the designers have in mind, and then retrofit if the design fails early? That’s what it comes down to, is the construction delay while a part is rebuilt because we assume the part is insufficient, or is this a lesson learned in blood?
The public has hired the NRC to represent its interests in maintaining a highly disciplined approach to designing, constructing, and operating a nuclear power plant.
Play all the rhetorical word games you want to. The central importance of nuclear-grade system and component quality assurance in the nuclear industry, not only here but world-wide, is a necessity which has long been recognized as essential to the future of nuclear power.
Repeating what I’ve said earlier, the next five to ten years will see a reduction in the NRC’s basic nuclear safety requirements, in the ALARA requirements, and also a move away from LNT radiation exposure theory.
However, anyone who has direct experience in managing successful nuclear construction projects knows full well that a reduction in the NRC’s nuclear system & component quality assurance requirements as described in 10 CFR 50 Appendix B is not on the table for discussion.
“But instead of meeting expectations, he adds, “nuclear power has fulfilled only a fraction of its original promise.”
That fraction has been about 20% for the last 30 years. Since the US has coal and natural gas, the fraction is only higher in countries like France.